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Human language has long been viewed as a product of both genes and individual external experience or culture, but the key puzzle has always been to assess the relative contribution of each. Is language more like fashion hemlines or more like the number of fingers on each hand? On the one hand, we know that all normal people, unlike any cats or fish, uniformly grow up speaking some language, just like having 5 fingers on each hand, so language must be part of what is unique to the human genome. However, if one is born in Beijing one winds up speaking a very different language than if one is born in Mumbai, so the number-of-fingers analogy is not quite correct. The right answer must therefore cut a fine line between sufficient genomic constraint guaranteeing that every child will successfully develop an adult language and sufficient lability guaranteeing that no matter where they are born each child will acquire the language of its caretakers. Now a new study in a recent issue of PNAS (1) promises to shed light on this fine balance between cultural experience and genetic entrenchment to language's design, all within the context of biological evolution. It maintains that the linguistic particulars distinguishing Mandarin from Hindi cannot have arisen as genetically encoded and selected-for adaptations via at least one common route linking evolution and learning, the Baldwin–Simpson effect (2). In the Baldwin–Simpson model, rather than direct selection for a trait, in this case a particular external behavior, there is selection for learning it. However, as is well known (2, 3), this entrainment linking learning to genomic encoding works only if there is a close match between the pace of external change and genetic change, even though gene frequencies change only relatively slowly, plodding generation by generation. …

What genes can't learn about language